Onboarding and product tours in SaaS: odds and benefits

Hi We do not currently use onboarding services in saas but I kwow User Pilot!

Upfront: I'm building a different approach to note-taking & task management (yeah, another one. It's different because it blends bullet journal style journaling with a powerful link engine. Think of it as a journal for notes & tasks with a kind of Workflowy engine inside). The app is very minimalist but built to scale. It quickly became clear that once people use it a lot, they start to get it and suddenly use it intensively. But most new users bounced before reaching that point. So we've tried various ways of onboarding. At first, to keep it simple, we tried demo content with usage examples. Worked a bit but quickly became outdated when the app changed. Also, user interviews revealed that it was way too wordy. No one wanted to read that much. Then we tried a full-fledged tutorial, with images & text. Explaining a lot of the main concepts of the app. Also here, people rather wanted to try out the app themselves instead of reading a manual in disguise. We ended up with short videos on repeat for the mobile app and a four-step interactive tutorial for the web-app. The final vote is still out, but it seems a quick, interactive onboarding tutorial seems to work best. The biggest lesson learned was to not try to show everything, but rather to spark interest and then let the user explore on their own.

I am currently not using onboarding services in saas.